see for miles
by TolkienGirl
Summary: Sometimes she just runs. (Tyra; Tim/Tyra, spanning the whole series.)


**A/N: Back to rewatching** ** _Friday Night Lights_** **. The perfection. The feels.**

When her daddy left, he told them he had to take care of himself. And Tyra thought then, that was a load of bull. Which it was, and is, and always will be.

It's plain unfair to care about yourself when you owe other people.

Tyra never owes other people. At least, that's the plan.

.

She certainly picked the right boyfriend for that. She doesn't owe Tim Riggins a damn thing, he's a loser with a clever mouth—and she doesn't mean clever about talking. He's a sullen dumbass, always spoiling for a fight, and Tyra doesn't owe him, but she loves him.

That turns out to be worse.

.

"You're in love with her," she says, and she can barely hear her own voice over the clang and rattle of lockers, the swarm of voices—and then again, her own voice is all she can hear.

Tim Riggins loves Lyla Garrity.

Truth-telling. There it is, in that little break in her voice, in the steady guilt in Tim's eyes. There it was again, written wide across the wider sky—Texas keeps no secrets forever, because there is nowhere to hide on the flats of fields or football fields.

.

She said _anyone but her_ because she had to, because Lyla Garrity is better by birth—

But Tim never cared about that before.

.

Tyra is tall and slim, flat along the planes of her hips and smoothly curved where it matters. Natural blonde; doesn't need a bottle. That's what her mama gave her—Angela, pretty and dried up, giving everything away—and she does like Mindy does, tricking out in tight jeans and flimsy tops, thrift-store cheap.

But in another way, she's nothing like Mindy. She sees the shine and sweat and ugliness at the Landing Strip. She saw it at twelve and she sees it now. She's no angel—farthest thing from—but she won't make money that way.

She tells herself she hasn't the patience.

.

There's this lie the movies tell you, about love: they tell you that you can keep doing it. That you can keep throwing it overboard and there'll still be enough. The truth is, Tyra learns early and well to keep track of her love. Tally it up, hold your cards, don't show your hand. Whatever it's safest to call it.

You can run out.

She runs out a hundred times in Texas.

Sometimes, she just runs.

.

She kisses Jason Street that night in the hospital, when they've drunk themselves sloppy and laughed out their tears. She kisses him soft and sweet and quiet, on the lips that have always been Lyla's, and then she says goodnight.

It feels like a grace and victory, until she lies in bed that night and thinks of Tim.

.

All roads lead to Tim, because all roads lead to Dillon, and Tim will never leave Dillon. In a way, that's the smartest thing he could have done. And in another way, it isn't.

.

For a long time after she gets out for good (for the greater good), she curses football whenever she has the chance. She left behind that fine yellow dust, the smell of oil and the cheering crowds. She left behind the whispering town, the bear and the dirt and that lonely kind of forever that only rises with a Texas summer sun.

She deserves to forget about football.

But when she hears that Tim Riggins is in prison, well, hell. It's like her body betrays her. She feels her mouth go dry, and she thinks, _not this way_ , as though she didn't his story would end like this.

As though his story was still hers to keep, after all this time.

.

"You've done a good thing, making yourself into something," Mrs. Taylor says. "You did that. Anybody else, I'd be proud of for letting a good thing come to them. But you went for it yourself, Tyra. You went for it yourself."

"I take care of myself," Tyra says. And it's true, and it's right, but it sticks in her throat like she doesn't deserve it.

.

When she falls back into his arms, it doesn't feel like the failure she'd feared it would be. She doesn't owe him, but she loves him, and when she runs this time—

She doesn't have to leave him behind.

Because Tyra is not her father, leaving, or her mother, being left. She is more than Dillon, than yellow dust, and she has more love to give than she thought she did, to the green-eyed boy beside her.

This is her story to keep.


End file.
